There is so much matter running around in my head I can’t really find any matter of which there is no such. Finishing my Feldenkrais supervision, seeing two unexpected old friends in one day, getting to have lunch with one new friend, it all feels like matter, matter, matter.

Hamlet is dismissing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s suggestion (eerily spoken together) that they wait upon him and I don’t have much matter on that matter – except that I wouldn’t want my friends waiting on me either. I don’t even like to go to restaurants where my friends are waiting tables.

This is one of those lines that Hamlet can mean one way and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can interpret another. It makes sense that Hamlet would be talking about reason as it relates to the little intellectual game they’ve been playing around ambition, etc – that he cannot reason anymore along those lines. And it would make sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, primed to look for Hamlet’s madness, would see this as an admission of his mental difficulties. It might inspire a knowing look between them, which in turn might explain why Hamlet doesn’t take them straight to the court as he just suggested he would but starts to investigate their motives. And thus this transition in the scene, which has baffled me before suddenly makes sense. This may be why that trip to the court stalls for a moment.

Where is the court and where isn’t it? It sort of seems like everywhere royalty is is the court. I think of Touchstone’s debate with Corin about court life versus country life. Court isn’t a room in that case, I don’t think. It’s, like, the castle, the environs. Duke Frederick in that same play suggests that Rosalind isn’t really gone until she’s 20 miles from court.

But. . .maybe sometimes it’s just a room. Certainly today it’s a room, not for royalty but for justice. But what constituted a court to Hamlet and what constituted a court to Shakespeare? In other words, where is Hamlet suggesting they go now? To go see Claudius? To a more formal setting? He’s not suggesting they go to the pub or to play at some sport. He’s not suggesting they go to their quarters. What are his intentions at the court? And what/where is it?

Ah, so because it is heroes and monarchs who are ambitious and if ambition is a shadow’s shadow, then, the ambitious shadow the unambitious. Is that the logic here? It’s funny. I’ve heard this line a million times but this is the first time I’ve tried to think it through.

Is every monarch ambitious? Don’t some of them just fall into the role by virtue of being born? But it’s interesting that Hamlet, a man who’s known some kings, should think it a necessary ingredient.

Scientifically, this metaphor makes a good deal of sense. On the radio, there was a scientist who, after climbing rocks all day, dreamed, vividly of climbing rocks. He set out to investigate dreaming, something that is scientifically quite tricky to explore. He searched for an activity that would reliably produce dreams and thought none would ever emerge. Then his students told him about Tetris and how playing a lot of Tetris would cause you to see falling bricks in the first flushes of sleep. And it was so.

And he concluded that many dreams are like Tetris, that we dream of what we did, we dream of a shadow of our days, we dream of a suggestion of what we did.
We don’t see the computer and the mouse. We don’t feel the chair. We don’t include the light outside or the music playing. We just dream of the bricks. We dream the essence of the thing or the silhouette. Or the shadow.

Despite this glass of coffee and the loud music pumping through the café, I almost fell asleep just now, while thinking about this line. It’s not that it’s a dull line – it isn’t. It’s one of the most interesting lines in this scene. Maybe that’s the trouble. It’s hard to have just the one perspective on it. I picture Hamlet all squished up tiny in a nutshell, like the meat of a walnut. Then I see him floating in space, stars and planets glowing around him, his head encircled with a shiny crown. Then I see the stars and the planets inside the nutshell with a little tiny Hamlet, only visible with a microscope. Then I see a something large with teeth eating up the night sky, chomping down on infinity, Hamlet covering his eyes in his nutshell.
But there is so much more to it than that. The small, the large, the tiny space, the infinite space and also bad dreams, why the vastness of it all makes my eyes droop and the letters blur on the page.

One of my favorite shows ever  featured two prisoners who realized that they could escape from their prison at any time. They hopped in and out of their cage, delighting in being both inside and outside it. They realized that they’d been inside their own prison.

Most of our prisons are like this. We build them ourselves and haven’t realized we’ve done it. In many cases, the confinement is only in the mind. We build the walls with ideas of what has been before or what we believe to be true. Sometimes the walls of the prison are built out of solid evidence and concrete experience but even when this is so, there is almost always a door and we almost never realize that we have the key.

I have the sense that my current prison has several doors but I have no idea where they are. I bump into a lot of walls looking for them.

Zen and the Art of Shakespeare.

This is like that story where the guy gets good news and he says something like, “We’ll see.” And also sigh bad news, like his kid breaks his leg and everyone asks him why he’s not upset and he’s like – well, he’s like, philosophical, like Hamlet here. I don’t recall all the details but basically the kid with the broken leg doesn’t have to go to war when they go around rounding up soldiers because of his leg. And we’re meant to see the kid’s father as wise because he neither wept for his son’s broken leg nor celebrated his reprieve. We’re meant to see it as nothing either good or bad.

I am not a fan of this story, I will confess. It sounds, to me, like a one-noted life in which successes are never celebrated and losses never mourned. It may be true that our thinking creates the world but I think we HAVE to feel it, too.

If only we could accept each other’s realities as we accept each other’s names. Oh, your name is Hamlet? Oh, you think Denmark is a prison? We generally can’t try and change what someone calls themselves but we do periodically try to shift how they see.

If I tell a Londoner how much I love her city, she might point out all the reasons to hate it. When I tell a fellow New Yorker how ridiculous I find the theatre scene here, I often get a litany of all the ways he thinks it’s great.

But it can be as simple as saying, it’s like that for you, and your name is your name.

Thinking about the architecture of a prison makes this line make a good deal more sense to me. The world is a goodly prison, a big one, like Alcatraz or The Tower of London. It’s not just one cell, it’s a whole complex with many places to lock a person up. You got your solitary confinements, your dark dark dungeons, your cell blocks, your minimum security, your maximum security. An old school prison probably has a great deal more lock-up variety than the modern prison or even the pre-fab office buildings which so often remind one of a prison.

I bet there are even some prisons where parts of them don’t even feel like prison. A garden perhaps, or a library. So one could live in a prison of a world and never really feel confined.